Eric Kolaczyk was born in 1968 in Chicago, Illiinois. He obtained a BS degree in mathematics from the University of Chicago, and MS and PhD degrees in statistics from Stanford University. He has been on the faculty in the Department of Mathematics and Statistics at Boston University since 1998, and was faculty in the Department of Statistics at the University of Chicago before that. He also has been visiting faculty at Harvard University and l'Universite Paris VII. He currently teaches an annual short-course at l'Ecole Nationale de la Statistique et de l'Administration Economique (ENSAE) in Paris.

Prof. Kolaczyk's main research interests currently revolve around the statistical analysis of network-indexed data, and include both the development of basic methodology and inter-disciplinary work with collaborators in bioinformatics, computer science, geography, neuroscience, and sociology. Besides various research articles on these topics, he has also authored three books in this area, including Statistical Analysis of Network Data: Methods and Models (Springer, 2009) and, joint with Gabor Csardi, Statistical Analysis of Network Data in R (Springer, 2014). Prior to his working in the area of networks, Prof. Kolaczyk spent a decade working on statistical multi-scale modeling.

He is an elected fellow of the American Statistical Association (ASA) and the Institute of Mathematical Statistics (IMS), an elected senior member of the Institute for Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE), and an elected member of the International Statistical Institute (ISI).